The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep is a product of its time. Some of the social beliefs it reflects are today widely deplored. These attitudes and practices, though used as descriptors and not necessarily meant as polemics, betray the author’s biases.

Philip Marlow is a man of his age. It’s the mid-1930s, when the world struggled under the economic Great Depression. Marlowe, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, tough-guy detective, possesses a macho sensibility coupled with a disdain for lifestyles of which he disapproves. Same-sex relationships in the late 1930s were frowned on or outlawed in nearly every jurisdiction in America. During this time, most Americans believed that being gay was immoral and that gay men were inherently less masculine and more flamboyantly feminine. Moreover, a common attitude among many Americans was that minorities were second-class citizens.

One of the novel’s antagonists is a gay blackmailer named Geiger who rents pornographic books. Not only is his sexual orientation used to explain why he is duplicitous, but Marlowe’s description of Geiger’s bedroom also contains deeply anti-gay and anti-Asian commentary based on stereotypes that tended to conflate homosexuality and Asian American men with effeminacy, thus packing a dose of sexism into the mix: Marlowe considers Geiger’s decor “womanish” and notes a “flounced” bedspread, perfume, and a triple mirror (27).